Protestant and economic thought

The deep relationship between these two texts, published in chronological proximity to one another, becomes clear when one considers that Schmitt’s formulation in the Illyria essay; “the great Illyrians do not make romantic music, but rather have a language”, was already formulated as a critique of “large-scale enterprise” in Roman Catholicism when Schmitt wrote, in a strangely almost backhanded defense of Soviet aesthetics, that “this primitive symbolism has something lacking in the most advanced machine technology, something human, namely, a language”¹⁵¹.

Roman Catholicism is an essay of manifold significance and can be understood as “a document of anti-modern criticism and of attack on the Weimar Republic, both as an elogium to the catholic majestas as well as a fragment and thus the foundation of Schmitt’s

‘irrationalism’ as well as a homage to Latin rationality, inspired by a deep Antinordischer Affekt”¹⁵². In all its aspects, however, it is embedded in Schmitt's attempt, present not only in Roman Catholicism, but in his entire oeuvre, to overcome the dualisms of modernity, the conflict between “thinking and being, material and spirit”¹⁵³, universality and the particular, between the infinite and the finite, the “Rechtsidee” and the Rechtswirklichkeit¹⁵⁴, the constitution as such (Verfassung) and the laws of the constitution (Verfassungsgesetze). In order to understand Schmitt's vision of the Catholic Church we therefore begin by looking at two prominent manifestations of modern dualistic thought which Schmitt addresses in this work. The first of these is Protestantism and the second what Schmitt calls “economic thought”.

Protestant rupture of nature and grace, so Roman Catholicism understands little of the dualisms of nature and spirit, nature and intellect, nature and art, nature and machine and their varying pathos”¹⁵⁵. For Schmitt, Protestantism's defining characteristic is not merely its general belief in the absolute division of nature and grace, the total depravity of man, but its belief in the primacy of an “invisible interiority”, in the nature of religion as a “private matter”¹⁵⁶, a “matter of the heart”¹⁵⁷ and a correspondingly invisible God. Protestantism's uncontrollable belief in sola fide, its absolute rejection of the efficacy of works, leads Protestantism to an ultimately anarchistic rejection of all dogmatic principles and, ultimately, to the belief in a God as invisible as the Protestant's interiority. For this reason Schmitt writes that “a high-minded Protestant like Rudolf Sohm could define the Catholic Church as something essentially juridical, while regarding Christian religiosity as essentially non-juridical”¹⁵⁸. Schmitt speaks further to this problem and specifically about Rudolf Sohm when he writes, years later in Glossarium:

There [in the foreword to volume 1 of Church Law] Sohm says, apparently very clearly: “The purely juristic approach has merely (!) formal value. […].”

This general, neutralizing view has something disconcerting about it. If the entire question resulted merely a general opposition between “mere form” and (more than mere) content, then it would not be that so agonizing and specific problem of church law¹⁵⁹.

According to Schmitt, Sohm the Lutheran jurist and church historian sees canon law as absolutely separate from the question of faith and, in doing so, represents a modern, Protestant fixation with essence and content as something truer than its mere form. Schmitt rejects this dualism, criticizing modernity's tendency towards interiority just as he criticized the romantic subjectivization of God. The next day's reflection in Glossarium reads: “To Sohm: the essence of art is also dependent on form. Does it contradict the essence of the spirit that there are scores and written poems, stable intervals and definite lines?”¹⁶⁰. Schmitt charges Sohm and the Protestant Modern with the belief that, just as true poetry resists being

155 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 11.

156 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 28.

157 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 29.

158 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 29.

159 Schmitt, Carl. Glossarium, 09.11.47.

160 Schmitt, Carl. Glossarium, 10.11.47. The importance of this form-content problematic finds further support if one turns to an interview given by Schmitt in 1971 and published in 2009 with the title Solange das Imperium da ist. “The unstated topic of my thought,” Schmitt says, “is the relationship between word and text.” “Now, […] the 'agraphos nomos' [unwritten law] and the written nomos and how the nomos changes in the moment in which it is written – all that belongs to this topic of word and text; word and text as, how should I say, the universal and central topic of that which moves me at all”:„Solange das Imperium da ist“:

Carl Schmitt im Gespräch mit Klaus Figge und Dieter Groh 1971, ed. Frank Hertweck and Dimitrios Kisoudis, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot 2010, p. 51.

written down, so true belief in God is fundamentally opposed to any corresponding dogmatic manifestation of this belief¹⁶¹. Yet, how invisible must God, must belief become, before faith and with it God ultimately disappear? In Protestantism's insistence upon the invisibility of God, its absolutely adogmatic conception of faith, lies its nihilism, its ultimate inability to understand God as something other than a gaping void, a vacuum, the Feuerbachian reflection of man's nothingness.

Though Protestantism provides us with a starting point for understanding the dualisms of this age, Schmitt's polemic in Römischer Katholizismus actually focuses much more intently on what he calls “economic thought”. Economic thought is closely associated with the “methodology of the natural-technical sciences”¹⁶², the aim of which is “domination and exploitation of matter”¹⁶³, “formulas for the manipulation of matter”¹⁶⁴. “Value neutral” in the worst sense of the word, “Modern technology easily becomes the servant of this or that want and need”, providing nothing other than a means of production, “be it for a silk blouse or poison gas or anything whasoever”¹⁶⁵. Schmitt then brings this critique to a point when he writes that economic thought “knows only one type of form, namely technical precision”¹⁶⁶. The dualism of this thought is then made clearer when we read that

Corresponding terms such as ‘reflex,’ ‘radiation’ or ‘reflection,’ which have reference to matter, denote various aggregate states of the same material substratum. With such images one makes something ideal comprehensible by incorporating it into one’s own material thinking. For example, according to the famous ‘economic’ conception of history, political and religious views are the ideological ‘reflex’ or relations of production¹⁶⁷.

In this manner, economic thought does not take religion seriously as a conviction, but sees only a strange emanation of fundamentally economic causes, emanations which are not, however, irrational as they may be, any more irrational than other irrational beliefs¹⁶⁸. Being religious is kind of like being insane and religion is treated by economic thought in the same way as fashion: “There are human beings who have religious needs – very well. Then these needs must be satisfied. This appers to be no less irrational than many senseless whims of

161 Here it is interesting to note the following formulation in Hans Kelsen’s Reine Rechtslehre, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2008, p. 48: “Just as, so long as there is a religion, there must also be a dogmatic theology which cannot be replaced by a psychology or sociology of religion, so there will – as long as there is law – be a normative theory of law”.

162 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 12.

163 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 13.

164 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 14.

165 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 14.

166 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 20.

167 Schmitt, Carl. RC, pp. 20-21; RK, p. 34: modified – N.H..

168 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 16.

fashion, which must also be served”¹⁶⁹. But a religious conviction, a belief and an insistence upon the possibility of transcendence, a despair – these are not needs which can be satisfied.

Thus, while it may seem that economic thought is actually capable of integrating many different factors, of explaining phenomenon of political, religious and psychological nature, providing a unified materialist reading of history, Schmitt does not see this as the capacity to integrate diverse phenomenon, but rather as the reduction of an organic whole into material objects understandable merely in terms of a rational-technical mechanism which is supposedly truly at their core. A voice cries out for meaning, for transcendence and salvation amidst the inhumane anonymity of the metropolis, but “Economic rationalism has accustomed itself to deal only with certain needs and to acknowledge only those it can ‘satisfy’”¹⁷⁰. This materialist reductionism is what Schmitt calls economic thought's demand for “real presence of things”¹⁷¹, “the ‘immanent’ material basis”¹⁷².

It is in this search for the “‘immanent’ material basis” that Schmitt finds the central object of his critique, namely, that this technically precise explication of the cause-effect relationship in purely immanent terms is in fact, its own form of absolute irrationality, an irrationality rooted in its incapacity for mediation. Such exactness is a sign that economic thought has, in turn, excluded an essential moment from its considerations, “Economic rationalism has accustomed itself to deal only with certain needs and to acknowledge only those it can ‘satisfy’”: “In the modern metropolis [economic thought] has erected an edifice wherein everything runs strictly according to plan”¹⁷³. Thus, “The political is considered

169 Schmitt, Carl. RC, pp. 15-16; RK, pp. 26-27. German original: “Es gibt Menschen, die religiöse Bedürfnisse haben – gut, also handelt es sich darum, diese Bedürfnisse reell zu befriedigen. Das scheint nicht irrationaler zu sein als manche sinnlose Laune der Mode, die doch auch bedient wird”.

170 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 15. Regarding Schmitt’s relationship to Berlin see: Berlin 1907 in Schmittiana: Beiträge zu Leben und Werk Carl Schmitts: Band 1, ed. Tommissen, Piet. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot 2011, pp. 11-21;

Schmitt, Carl. ECS, p. 35; Hertweck/Kisoudis, Solange das Imperium da ist, pp. 54-55. See further: Wirtz, Thomas. Der Pendler Carl Schmitt, pp. 406-415 in: Preussische Stile: Ein Staat als Kunstwerk, ed. Patrick Bahners and Gerd Roellecke, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 2001. See further: Heidegger, Martin. Schöpferische Landschaft: Warum bleiben wir in der Provinz?, pp. 9-13 in: Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 13: Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens: 1910-1976, ed. Hermann Heidegger, Frankfurt: Klostermann 1983. Of further interest is the general horror and anonymity felt by vast portions of the early 20th century intellectuals, not only in Berlin, but in metropolises such as Paris as well, expressed, for example, by Rilke in The Notebooks of Malte Laurrids Brigge. One is reminded of the scene in the film Berlin: Symphonie einer Großstadt in which a suicide goes more or less unnoticed amidst the bustle of the metropolis.

171 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 20; RK, p. 35: modified – N.H.. I have altered Ulmen’s translation of the phrase

“Realpräsenz der Dinge” from “the actual presence of things” to “the real presence of things”.

172 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 21.

173 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 15. A noteworthy repetition of this critique can be found in the recent publication of a fragment from Schmitt’s literary estate in which Schmitt addresses the discussion in 1968 surrounding the introduction of an article (Notstandsgesetzt) into the constitution of the German Federal Republic meant to address a “state of emergency”. Schmitt’s critique of this discussion is interesting in that, far from welcoming such a discussion and seeing in it a confirmation of his own theory, Schmitt sees in the 1968 discussion only a further will to “undisturbed functioning” (ungestörten Funktionieren). See: Meinel, Florian. Diktatur der Besiegten? Ein Fragment Carl Schmitts zur Notstandsverfassung der Bundesrepublik, pp. 455-73 in: Der

unobjective [unsachlich], because it appeals to values which are not economic”¹⁷⁴. The economic cannot understand the “idea” or “ethos of conviction¹⁷⁵”, without which “no political system can survive even a generation”¹⁷⁶. What economic thought has forgotten is that politics is undertaken in “in the name of ‘right’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘order’ or ‘peace’”¹⁷⁷ and that a war waged, for instance, in the name of national freedom or liberty is based on something more than mere economic gain but that people are willing to die for a cause beyond their personal welfare. In order to illustrate this Schmitt draws upon the example of an employer who says to the workers, “I feed you” and the workers who answer “we feed you”¹⁷⁸: “That is no struggle of production and consumption, in no sense something economic; it derives from a different conviction about what is moral or lawful. It concerns the ethical or legal determination of who is actually the producer, the creator and therefore the owner of modern wealth”¹⁷⁹.

Economic thought, incapable of processing anything but the economic, can achieve its perfectly precise explanation of the cause-effect relationship only at the price of a radical exclusion of everything non-economic¹⁸⁰. This exclusion results in what may be called the economic's deficient mode of being, its ‘false’ totality or, to put it more pointedly, its lie, and means that economic thought is defined by Schmitt less in terms of what it is and more by what it is not, by what it lacks, in short, by a fundamental absence, not by its capacity but by its incapacity¹⁸¹: “mechanism is not capable of creating a totality. Nor can the pure innerworldliness of an individual physical being arrive at a meaningful totality”¹⁸².

Staat 52 (2013).

174 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 16; RK, p. 27: translation – N.H.. German original: “Das Politische ist ihm unsachlich, weil es sich auf andere als nur ökonomische Werte berufen muss”. Cf. “The political is considered immaterial, because it must be concerned with other than economic values”.

175 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 17; RK, p. 28: translation – N.H..

176 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 17.

177 Schmitt, Carl. BdP, p. 62.

178 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 17; RK, p. 30: translation – N.H.. Cf. Marx, Karl. Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Erster Band: Buch I: Der Produktionsprozeß des Kapitals, chapter 8.1, p. 249, vol. 23 in: Marx Engels Werke, Berlin: Dietz 1972.

179 Schmitt, Carl. RC, pp. 17-18.

180 Cf. Otto Strasser’s critique of Marxists’ thought “Your [Marxists’] fundamental error is that you deny or ridicule and do not understand the soul and the spirit which moves all things”, cit. in Reich, Wilhelm. Die Massenpsychologie des Faschismus, Köln: Anaconda 2011, p. 28.

181 An interesting point of contact can be seen here between Schmitt and the Marxist tradition of Horkheimer, Adorno and Lukács who saw in the ‘instrumentally’ rationalized world a false totality. Of particular interest is Lukács belief “that the ‘apparently complete’ rationalization of the world, although it reaches ‘all the way into the human being’s deepest physical and psychological being’, has its limits – it finds its limitations ‘in the formal character of its own rationality’” (Lukács, Georg. Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein in: Werke, vol. 2, Neuwied: Luchterhand 1968). Lukács, Habermas writes, “counts on a reservoir which is resistant to objectification in the human being’s subjective nature”. See: Habermas, Jürgen. TkH, vol. 1. p. 491. The drawing of this parallel is, of course, not intended to equate the two arguments with one another, but merely to both note a similarity as well as to use this similarity for the purposes of mutual elucidation.

182 Schmitt, Carl. Der Staat als Mechanismus bei Hobbes und Descartes, pp. 139-151 in: SGN, p. 146: emphasis

Schmitt’s critique of capitalism and its dominance over the state has its ideological root in the inability of the economic to ever provide an ultimate meaning to life, to keep open the door to transcendence¹⁸³. For Schmitt, capitalism, as economy, that is, in analogy to private law and in opposition to the public sphere of representation, remains a “system of needs” and thus denies the ideological basis of life and the possibility of sacrificing one’s life for a substantive belief, for an idea, for something higher. And it is for this reason that, while Schmitt was certainly interested in maintaining a dominance of the bourgeoisie over and above the proletariat, and understood private property as a “basic right” in his Verfassungslehre, it is also incorrect to argue that Schmitt’s thought centers around an

“authoritarian liberalism”¹⁸⁴ and the establishment of an economic bourgeois hegemony. His insistence upon the superiority of the state over and above economy is a constant characteristic of his production, from the 1920’s into the 1930’s and underlies much of his support for the fascist, corporative model of the state¹⁸⁵.

It is in this demand for an immanently “real presence of things” that we see the fundamental convergence of economic and Protestant as well as Romantic thought in Schmitt's critique and the reason for which even the most contrary attacks on the Catholic Church all really express the same radical dualism. For, at first glance, the relationship between economic and protestant thought seems one of opposition, that is, it seems as if economic thought insists upon finding an exact correspondence between cause and effect, while Protestantism’s invisible god ultimately renders any causal relationship between God and dogma impossible. In the same way it seems that the economic’s reduction of spiritual phenomenon to a material basis stands in absolute opposition to the Romantic's absolutely

“incalculable” “relationship of the fantastic”. Unlike the dream of a Romantic, “Economic thought has its own reasons and veracity in that it is absolutely material, concerned only with things”¹⁸⁶ and the critical lines which Schmitt wrote in Political Romanticism could just as well come from a proponent of “economic thought”: “the Romantic believes to have heard what the bells said, while all the bells did was ring”¹⁸⁷.

And yet the fundamental argument of Roman Catholicism lies therein that Schmitt

– N.H..

183 This necessity of keeping open the door to transcendence underlies Schmitt’s “Hobbes-crystal”, “the fruit of a lifelong work”, Schmitt, Carl. BdP, pp. 113-114.

184 Heller, Hermann. Autoritärer Liberalismus? (1933), pp. 643-653 in: Gesammelte Schriften. Zweiter Band:

Recht, Staat, Macht, Leiden: Sijthoff 1971. With regard to Schmitt Heller’s text refers primarily to Schmitt’s lecture Starker Staat und gesunde Wirtschaft, held on November 23^rd, 1932, pp. 71-91 in: SGN.

185 Schmitt, Carl. Wesen und Werden des faschistischen Staates, pp. 124-130 in: Positionen und Begriffe im Kampf mit Weimar – Genf – Versailles 1923-1939 (1940; henceforth: PB), corrected 4^th edition, Berlin:

Duncker & Humblot 2014.

186 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 16.

187 Schmitt, Carl. PR, p. 152.

makes clear the intimate relationship between the Protestant-Romantic denial of any causal relationship between the spiritual and the material and the economic’s reduction of all spiritual phenomena to their material basis. Thus, it is not only clear that Schmitt, in thoroughly Weberian tones, sees Protestantism as culturally related to capitalism, it also becomes apparent that Protestantism's rejection of dogma and its emphasis on faith over and above confession is in effect a demand for the “real presence of things”. While Protestantism demands the real presence of things because it cannot accept that God be partially visible or man only partially sinful, economic thought demands the real presence of things because it cannot cease to believe that there is, underlying everything, one single material cause.

Ultimately, what neither can admit is the partial correspondence of things in a 'merely' mediated relationship. The description of a rationality capable of such mediation and therefore the truly real presentation of things is the attempt which we are offered by representative thought in Roman Catholicism.

Excursis on the term “thought” (Denken)

In examining Schmitt’s critique of Protestant-economic thought we have at times spoken of Schmitt’s critique of Protestantism and his defense of Catholicism. This characterization is, however, somewhat misleading. For, when Schmitt critiques Protestantism as the religion of

“invisible interiority” it is important to keep in mind that Schmitt’s interest does not lie in providing a complete picture of Protestantism, neither in all of its variants nor in the full complexity of its development and dogma, but rather in finding its metaphysical core, its idea or its “thought”. Differentiating between the concrete political-historical manifestations of Protestantism, capitalism, or for that matter Catholicism, and their ideal content is central for understanding the methodology of Schmitt’s own thought. Thus, when turning to Constitutional Theory in the next section of this chapter, it will b important to keep in mind that we are not dealing with “representative thought” as such, but with Schmitt's understanding of political Repräsentation. As a particular concept Repräsentation is not to be equated with representative thought as a whole, since representative thought is concerned with a much broader argument and explication of a way of thinking which exceeds the boundaries of a political term. A definition of what Schmitt means with the term “thought” is therefore of central importance not only for the previous and coming subsections, but also because in the second part of this chapter we will interact with two other forms of thought which Schmitt discusses: juristic and political thought.

Schmitt employs the term thought (Denken) repeatedly, in various contexts. In diverse